1. Field of the Invention
The present general inventive concept relates to a printing apparatus and method, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method of changing a printer driver, and a printing system and method using the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, printer drivers are developed by individual printer manufacturers. Therefore, when a user purchases a printer to perform a printing operation, the user is provided with a printer driver for the printer manufactured by the printer manufacturer.
Printer manufacturers usually adopt a printer driver language that was agreed in advance by the printer manufacturers and has been widely used to make their printers compatible with other printers manufactured by other printer manufacturers.
A conventional method of printing an image or a text in an application program is as follows. To print the image or the text in the application program, a user selects a print command through a user menu. Then, a printer driver receives the print command, converts desired data in the application program into data that can be printed, and transmits the converted data to a printer. In this case, the printer driver and the printer use the same printing language which has been previously agreed.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of a conventional printing system for explaining a general printing process. When a user selects a print command on a menu provided by an application program 100 and generates the print command to print an image or a text in the application program 100, the application program 100 outputs a print command. A printer driver 120 interprets the print command transmitted from the application program 100 and generates print data or reformats the print command transmitted from the application program 100. A printer 140 receives the print data or the reformatted print command. If data received from the printer driver 120 is the print data, the printer 140 unzips and prints the print data. If the received data is the reformatted print command, the printer 140 interprets the reformatted print command and generates printable data.
In the conventional printing system, a single driver using only one printing language is used as the printer driver 120 of the printer 140. Thus, the print data is created in a predetermined format. The printer driver 120 can be largely divided into two types. One of the two types of printer drivers interprets print commands created in an application program and compresses data to print after a host generates the data, and transmits the data to a printer. The other one of the two types of printer drivers reformats the print commands generated in the application program into a predetermined format and transmit the reformatted print commands to the printer. In other words, the second type of printer drivers output the reformatted print commands that can be interpreted and printed by the printer.
An example of the one of the two printer types of the printer drivers is a graphics device interface (GDI) type printer driver, and an example of the other one of the two printer types of the printer drivers is a printer control language (PCL) type printer driver. The one of the two types of the printer drivers secures a memory space in units of pages and generates print data in the space. Therefore, the one of the two types of the printer drivers generates a bitmap as the print date to be printed. The generated bitmap is compressed according to a method determined by each manufacturer to minimize the size of transmission data and transmitted to a printer.
As described above, the other one of the two types of the printer drivers reformats the print commands transmitted from the application program and transmits the print commands to the printer. The print commands may be reformatted in a general format. An example of the general format is a format used by the PCL type printer drivers, and printer drivers using the general format are compatible with other types of printer drivers.
However, the conventional printing system has the following problems. First, a printer driver is dedicated to a printer when the printer is released in the market, that is, when the printer is manufactured. In other words, only one printer driver is used in a designated printer. Even if other printer driver has better advantages that the only one printer driver, the other printer driver cannot be used in the designated printer. Specifically, while various printer drivers have their own advantages and disadvantages, only one printer driver is involved in a printing operation of the designated printer. Thus, disadvantages as well as advantages of the printer driver are reflected in the designated printer.
Second, the printing operation cannot be performed when a bug occurs in the printer driver during the printing operation or a software error occurs in the printer that receives data. Thus, a user cannot print desired data even though the printing operation is repeated. Such a problem increases printer maintenance costs.